"Callous, Cold and Deliberately Duplicitous": Racialization, Immigration and the Representation of HIV Criminalization in Canadian Mainstream Newspapers
"This
report explores mainstream Canadian newspaper coverage of HIV
non-disclosure criminal cases in Canada. It pays particular attention to
how defendants’ race and immigration status figure into the newspaper
representations of such cases. We empirically enquire into claims that
African, Caribbean and Black (ACB) people living with HIV are negatively
portrayed and overrepresented in Canadian newspaper stories about HIV
non-disclosure cases. Our analysis is based on what, to our knowledge,
is the largest data set of news coverage of the issue: a corpus of 1680
English-language Canadian newspaper articles about HIV non-disclosure
criminal cases in Canada written between 1 January 1989 and 31 December
2015. Our quantitative and qualitative findings show that Canadian
mainstream newspapers are a source of profoundly stigmatizing
representations of ACB men living with HIV. For example, Black immigrant
men living with HIV are dramatically overemphasized in Canadian
mainstream newspaper stories about such cases. While these men account
for only 15% of defendants charged they are the focus of 61% of
newspaper coverage. Mainstream newspapers rely on forms of language that
transfer a long history of exaggerated connections between criminality,
race, sex, and otherness to the site of HIV. The result is that ACB
men living with HIV are repeatedly represented as dangerous,
hypersexual, foreigners who pose a threat to the health and safety of
individuals (White women) and, more broadly, the imagined Canadian
nation."
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